Terrence R. Stanford, Ph.D.
Professor, Translational Neuroscience
Wake Forest University School of Medicine

Imposing urgency to generate insights into the neural mechanisms of perceptual decision-making and motor choice

One of the most ubiquitous choices we make is that of where to look next.  At 3-5 saccadic eye movements every second, the primate oculomotor system provides a unique window into understanding the dynamic interrelationships between perceptual, cognitive, and motor systems that serve visuomotor behavior.  Yet, distinguishing the respective contributions of these distinct functional domains to any given saccadic choice is challenging.  Using a recently developed urgent choice paradigm, our lab has sought to isolate the impact of perceptual, motor, and attentional processes to visuomotor performance, in doing so, providing novel insights into their neural bases.  Our findings relate the activities of neural phenotypes in the frontal eye fields (FEF) and lateral intraparietal area (LIP) to the perceptual evaluation, attentional allocation, and motor planning processes that underlie perceptual decisions and accompanying saccadic motor reports.  The data that I’ll describe today newly circumscribe the contributions of FEF and LIP neural subtypes to these essential functional capacities.

Faculty Host: Daeyeol Lee